Open Wavelength

I didn't set out to write a philosophy on my body. I set out to get a cool tattoo.

That's how most of it starts, I think. Not with grand intention but with a moment, a feeling, a gift, a dare, a grief that needed somewhere to live outside of you. The meaning comes later, or you realize it was always there and you just needed the needle to make it visible.

I have six tattoos. Together they are the most honest document I've ever produced, more honest than anything I've written, because you can't delete ink. You can't go back and revise what you were feeling when you chose it. It lives on your skin in the exact form it took the day you decided this matters enough to make permanent.

This is what mine say.

My right calf. DJ Yoda. Aviator shades with an orange crowd reflected in the lenses, headphones around his neck labeled MASTER, the whole image fading into skin like he's emerging from smoke.

My girlfriend gave it to me as a Father's Day present. She's my wife now.

I had a different tattoo in mind originally, something I'd deliberated over. The artist told me it would need to cover my entire back to work properly. So I defaulted. DJ Yoda had been a decal on my car for years already. He felt right. He still does.

There's something worth sitting with in that story. The tattoo I thought I wanted was too big to actually have. The one I got instead had already been living with me, stuck to the back of my car, riding around as part of how I moved through the world without me formally claiming it. Sometimes the thing that's already yours just needs a more permanent address.

DJ Yoda is joy. He's the part of me that doesn't take itself too seriously, that finds the fun in the force, that wears sunglasses and plays music in a galaxy far far away and doesn't particularly care what anyone thinks about it. He's also, quietly, a symbol of what that relationship already was. A woman who paid attention to what made me smile and gave it to me in permanent form. That's not a small thing.

Right inner forearm. Three pixel hearts and a semicolon rendered in 8-bit, the leftmost heart half filled in red, the middle heart an empty outline, the semicolon in red at the end.

I got this one coming out the other side of a serious depression. Around the same time I got a promotion to Desktop Engineer. Both things happened in the same season, the darkness lifting and the work recognizing me, and I needed to mark it somehow.

A semicolon is what a writer uses when a sentence could have ended but didn't. You chose to continue. That's the whole thing. That's all it needs to be.

The pixel hearts are a life bar. Anyone who has ever played a video game knows the sinking feeling of watching your hearts deplete. I was running low. I found the checkpoint. The bar isn't full in the image and that's intentional. I'm not pretending I came out of it at a hundred percent. I came out of it continuing, which is the only thing that was required.

Left inner forearm. A half heart in red, a half spade in black, fused into a single symbol. Beside it in Dwarven script: Akh sartos oen durgrimst. For clan and family.

Both sets of grandparents played cards. That's where this starts. Not with mythology or philosophy but with kitchen tables, decks of cards, and people who loved me before I knew what love was supposed to look like. The heart and the spade together carry both of them. Splitting the symbol, half red, half black, felt true to the way memory works. You don't get the whole thing back. You get the half that matters.

I designed the symbol myself, iterating through versions on a yellow legal pad, then in MS Paint, four orientations of the same heart and spade before I found the one that felt right. What reads as simple and direct on the skin took months of living with before I committed. That's how I treat permanence. Nothing goes on my body that hasn't been lived with first.

When my arms cross, survival faces roots. Right forearm meets left. The things that keep you here looking directly at the things worth staying for. I didn't plan that. It assembled itself.

Left calf. An inkblot. Abstract, dense, with pops of color embedded in the black, shapes that resolve differently depending on the angle and the light and what you bring to the looking.

It looks like a skull to me. Other people see other things. That's the whole point.

We spend enormous energy trying to establish the correct interpretation of things, the right reading, the authoritative version. But meaning is not a fixed property of the object. It's a transaction between the object and the observer. The inkblot doesn't have a meaning. It has a surface. You bring the meaning. And what you bring tells you something about yourself that the inkblot never could.

Inner left bicep. Two letters, CC, with a halo above and a devil's tail curling off the end. Small. Quiet. Personal.

CC stands for Chaos Crew, a name for a group of friends who shaped a version of me I still carry. But it also stands for the duality I've never been able to resolve and have stopped trying to. The part of me that follows rules and the part that bends them. The halo and the tail living on the same letterform.

I used to think duality was a problem to solve. That eventually you pick a side, settle into one consistent version of yourself, and the tension goes away. It doesn't. The tension is the engine. The halo and the tail aren't opposites fighting each other. They're the same current running in two directions, and the interesting thing happens in the middle where they meet.

Inner right bicep. Pure black. No color, no accent, just line and intention. SMIB. So mote it be. Block serif letters, large, authoritative. And running directly through the middle of them in Greek script: agnosto. Unknown.

I've spent most of my life in pursuit of knowing. I want to understand what happens after we die, where consciousness comes from, what we are and why, how the new science and the old wisdom connect, what the pattern underneath everything actually is. I will never stop asking. The asking is part of who I am.

But somewhere along the way I made a kind of peace. Not with not knowing. Peace with the fact that some questions are open by design. That the mystery isn't a problem to solve but a territory to inhabit. That you can live well and love well and build well without having the final answer in hand.

So mote it be. You ride the wave. You don't command the ocean. All you can do is show up fully, bring everything you have to the moment in front of you, and trust that the doing is enough even when the knowing isn't complete.

The unknown runs through the center of the intention. You can't read one without the other being present. That's not an accident. That's the whole thing.

My wife looked at them once and said I was like a butterfly. She wasn't wrong. The calves are in color, bold and expressive, the most outward facing pieces. The forearms are black with red accents, grounded and emotional but more contained. The inner biceps are pure black, closest to the chest, closest to the heart, the most internal and philosophical marks of all.

Color at the foundation fading to pure black at the center. Loud at the edges, quiet at the core. I didn't design it that way. My OCD required bilateral symmetry in the placement and the meaning determined the content and somewhere between those two systems an aesthetic logic emerged that neither one was consciously operating at. Expression at the feet. Essence at the heart. A butterfly I built without knowing I was building it.

I didn't plan the sequence. It emerged the way most true things emerge: one decision at a time, each one made in a specific moment with specific weight, and only legible as a pattern when you step back far enough to see the whole.

But here is what I didn't know when I started. A map isn't most useful on the days when you know exactly where you are. It's most useful on the days when you don't.

There are days when things get heavy enough that I end up curled up on the floor or in the tub, legs crossed, meltdown or something worse, the kind of dark that makes everything feel very far away. And in those moments I look down.

From that position I can see hints of DJ Yoda and the inkblot at my feet. Joy and perspective, holding me up from the ground. My forearms in front of me, survival on the right, roots on the left, the things worth staying for facing the proof that I already chose to stay. And closer to my chest, duality on the left bicep, acceptance on the right. The full argument, visible from the floor, written in the only ink that can't be revised or deleted.

The sentence didn't end.

I built a map of myself without knowing I was building it, and it turns out the map is legible exactly when I need it most.

That's probably how philosophy works too. Not handed down complete from some elevated place but built piece by piece from the inside out, from the moments that mattered, from the things that needed to be said badly enough that you made them permanent.

I carry all of it everywhere I go. It moves when I move. And on the days when I forget who I am, I look down, and it tells me.